Blog Post: Jan 23, 2025

Date: Jan 23, 2025
Author: Rabbi Michael

This past Tuesday, I got back after spending the past several weeks in Israel, with my family and then with a group of Reform Rabbis led by the leaders of the Steven Wise Free Synagogue. I can't begin to recount everything I saw, but I'll give it a try;

I saw the exhibitions at the new National Library of Israel. I saw my family! (picture below)

I saw story after story of hope and fear on October 7th.

I saw the Druze minority in Israel, who had 12 children die in a missile strike in their small town last summer and said to me, "We want only one thing. Not revenge, no - we want our children to be the last victims.”

I saw (and heard, and felt) the boom of artillery, over and over, towards Gaza - the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire in Lebanon.

I saw a young Palestinian woman, who told me that despite it all, she chooses optimism. "What other choice do I have but to hope?" (picture below).

I saw geopolitical analysts, who, to my surprise AND theirs, gave me messages of hope for almost all who live in the middle east.

I saw a survivor who fled the massacre at Nova and documented every moment of it - then, when I took him out to dinner, learned that the government ended his Aliyah support when he left Israel to tell his story to Jews all over the world (photo below).

And I saw my former student and now friend, a first year rabbinical student at HUC, navigating the complexities of an American, and Jewish identity amidst all of this. But I want to focus on perhaps the most important thing of all that I saw. In the book of Torah we have just begun, Shemot, we have this curious line a few lines in - a word appears that has never applied to Jews before in the narrative. And it is Pharaoh who says it! "הִנֵּ֗ה עַ֚ם בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל רַ֥ב וְעָצ֖וּם מִמֶּֽנּוּ" Behold, this people of Israel is more numerous and mightier than us.

Over and over again, this idea of AM came up. Peoplehood. I saw it when we met with young Jews headed to rebuild homes and towns ravaged by war. I saw it when I met with the Druze minority who told me that they had a "pact of brotherhood’ with all the Israelis they worked with. Peoplehood came up when I heard Israelis of all stripes deeply familiar with the situations that American Jews are facing. I saw it over and over again when Every Single Person We Met that heard some of us were from California wanted to know if we and our families were okay in light of the fires they knew were happening in LA. In a way I had never experienced before, I spoke to so many people connected to American communities in strong ways - who shared in our experiences in the way that we here often share in theirs.

One of the strangest things about Exodus, a book beginning a new identity as a people, is what it implies - hard times have a role in the formation of a people. A silver lining in the difficult experiences of the past 475 days has been how these times, harder than we can remember, have re-oriented so many of us to our shared sense of peoplehood and connection.

The great philosopher Peter Singer once said that the entire point of moral philosophy or religion is to expand the circle of who we include in the word "We." This, this expanding circle, is what I bring back to you, from Israel; from the people Israel; that even in hard times we have a chance to ever renew our sense of "we."